Johanna Warren: Gemini II

Johanna Warren’s latest release, Gemini II continues her run of simple and heartfelt songs… well, to call these songs simple is not quite correct. In that they are clear and mainly feature just her guitar and voice, then yes, nothing complex to fight through. But this is because the words are everything here. These songs are snapshots of conversations, conversations between two people, between two sides of the same person or just conversations that should have been had but were not.

And sometimes you just don’t know. Hopelessness Has Done Nothing For Me sounds like a conversation with herself, possibly about affairs that have ended but without a reason: “How can you be sorry when you don’t even know what you did?” For some, this situation may be hopeless, but here the recognition that “hopelessness has done nothing for me” provides a hint of encouragement: “Now you’ve got a stranger in your home, might as well sit down and try to get to know him”. There, I was happy with this deconstruction.

And then I thought, or is it about the realisation that the person you have been living with all this time is not the person that you thought they were – and so need to get to know them from afresh?

Whatever. These songs are about relationships that have been fractured, either beyond repair or exploring how they may be mended and not just taped over. Was It Heaven reflects on what appears to be a permanent fracture, examining how much people try to make a relationship work but when it reaches an end, there is no attribution, no one side more than another. It may be the end of a chapter, but there is a great sense of the positive, present across the album, and here with “Mend your broken wings, I hope you’ll fly again”.

The positive appears again clearly in Mine To Take when advice to lighten up is given, to shed a few more layers and to look inside to find a friend. Attached with this positivity is a sense of clarity of understanding of how relationships work. Whatever our knowledge of these things, we all get into relationships for a variety of reasons but when they break down, not very often is there clarity of the situation now, as well as where we should go onward? The message from these songs is that too much time is spent on recollection, remonstration and denial. And from these songs we can take a hint that actually, these things happen, and yes it is okay to examine, but don’t dwell, don’t linger. We will all find our path, but only if we are looking forward.

And so the analysis is common. Cause And Effect sounds like a one-sided conversation, this time self-examination of whether things happened ‘because of’ or ‘as a result of’. The song suddenly stops. A sudden closure. That has been explored. Move on.

inreverse is the hook that initially drew me into this album. I had it on in the background whilst doing something else but I found I stopped doing that and turned up to listen. The steady rhythm of the guitar, the throaty clear vocals are visceral. The words catch and I have heard them before. Not in this song. Not in this order. But they are the words that we all might hear at some point in our lives. More damaged relationships and more self-examination, in this case the other party not understanding and learning to know and love oneself. It might not make literal sense at times, but that does not matter. We cannot be inside Johanna’s head but we can take her words and her music into ours.

So, an album of reflective music. At one level, as someone on Twitter pointed out, a great album for a late night: soft, gentle, flowing. At another level, a great starting point for positive self-exploration and lessons in handling the breaks and the heartbreaks. Whatever your reason, give a listen, and concentrate! Start with inreverse: “Some stories make more sense read in reverse”.

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